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In the terminology of design, an “affordance” is what we perceive an object as inviting us to do. Thus a doorknob invites us to turn it, a button on a computer screen invites us to click on it, and so forth. For the students in the old conservatories, specific patterns in basses and melodies invited specific completions in four voices. Using four contestants in the harmony contest of 1877 as a sample, we can judge the perceived strength of the affordances of the given melody by noticing how similar are the contestants’ responses. If three or four of the contestants realized a short passage of the given melody in the same way, it probably means that their educations and experiences had led them to hear that passage in the same way and with a very similar meaning.

Hiroshi Ishii conducts research in the MIT Media Lab in two principal areas: the field of Human-Computer Interactions, and the field of interface design linking human beings, digital information and the environment. In this dialogue, Hiroshi describes two of the basic concepts of the Media Lab: the first is to achieve ‘tangible bits’ in human-computer interaction, and the second concerns ‘affordance’, which refers to the possibility of an action on an object or environment, in particular, those of which we are aware. He also explains how they create ‘digitally augmented objects’ to improve our understanding and knowledge of objects and their immediate environment. Hiroshi later reflects on the difficulties of developing natural language interfaces, and whether ‘things can think’—he is co-director of Things That Think. He also discusses breakthroughs with his ‘radical atoms’ vision of developing materials that have a shape and appearance which can be digitally transformed to make them as reconfigurable as pixels on a screen. Finally, he outlines some of his projects, such as eg. one related to the use of kinetic memory, the ability to ‘record and playback physical motion’.

The Introduction distinguishes the modern Japanese composer from the performer-composer in the sphere of Japanese traditional music. The author situates herself in terms of experience and motivation and the book in terms of ethnomusicology. The discussion of modernity in the book is framed and affordance theory established as the analytic.

The chapter suggests that the dominant architectural history is too logocentric and not speculative enough. As such, its only merit is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession of neat logically necessary types. The case will be made for the role of topology as the antidote to the pernicious typological essentialism. Architecture needs to be free from the ideas of epoch and destiny. Following Brian Massumi’s lead, the speculative aspect relates to the contingently obligatory becoming, an event: “intrepidly future-facing, far-rangingly foretracing.” While it would appear logical that space should precede affordance, in fact the inverse holds true. The degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is proto-subjective and sub-representational. As Hayles put it, consciousness is overrated. In terms of architectural thinking everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a virtuality. According to Deleuze, the plane of composition - as a work of sensation - is aesthetic: "it is the material that passes into the sensation." Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm expands to become a dimension of being itself. Both subjects and objects come to be seen as derivative. Consequently, the mereological relationship - which is perfectly suitable for the realm of the extensive - needs to be radically revamped in order to become capable of capturing topological transformations. But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. What is needed instead is heuristics as a practice of material inference. However disadvantageous this may seem to the architect, it will prove not to be so once we fully grasp the Affective Turn and its implications for the discipline. It might become apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity, rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation.

Paul McCormick takes a narratological approach in examining the cinematic qualities of House of Leaves as part of the book’s ‘media interface.’ Borrowing the term ‘affordance’ from ecological psychologist J. J. Gibson, which signifies both the inherent properties of an artefact and its perceived usage, McCormick proposes that Danielewski transposes the media affordances of cinema into the book medium in four central ways: a video diary, the perceptual frame of a surveillance camera, the concept of cinematic montage, and a documentary film. These borrowings create what McCormick calls a ‘postmodern uncertainty’ and a ‘level of indeterminacy’ which render the novel both eternally incomplete and firmly situated within the media environment of 1990s America.